Wordless novels and motionless movies
Novels have words and films move. But some creators have resisted even these conventions, creating novels without writing and films without motion.
Category: Europe
War hailstones
More than a thousand English soldiers were killed by hailstones during the Siege of Chartres in 1360.
Fantasy revised
In the original edition of The Hobbit, Gollum was willing to give up the ring; before 1994 the American and British editions of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader were different; Madame Mim was removed from The Sword and the Stone for its 1958 reissue.
Breeches of The Last Judgment
After Michelangelo’s death, his friend Daniele da Volterra was employed by the Vatican to paint over the genitalia of the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment.
Return of the space dogs
Laika, the first space dog, died in orbit. But the next two – Belka and Strelka – survived. One of Strelka’s puppies was gifted to John F. Kennedy… but not before it was fully scanned for secret listening devices.
Man-lifting war kites
A large enough kite can lift someone off the ground. So, of course, several inventors and aeronauts tried to find a military application for such man-lifting kites.
Habeas corpulent
Habeas corpus formally entered English law because of a parliamentarian’s fat joke in 1679.
February 30th
The calendar date February 30th has happened just once in history: in Sweden in 1712.
Double borrowing
The English language is notorious for borrowing words from other languages. And sometimes it borrows them more than once.
Ball of the burning men
Six dancers in costume caught on fire at a ball in 1393 Paris. Only two survived; one of them was King Charles VI.
Oldest government in exile
The Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic has operated as a government in exile for more than a hundred years.
Horned Moses
Michelangelo’s statue of Moses has horns, thanks to a mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate Bible.
Scavenger cistern
The Basilica Cistern in Istanbul is an underground underwater forest of 336 huge marble columns. It was built in the 6th century CE, but parts are much older – because they were scavenged from other buildings, sometimes with original sculptures intact.
German troublemakers
In the 1865 German children’s book Max and Moritz, the titular troublemakers blow up a teacher, are baked in an oven, and finally get ground up in a flour mill and eaten by ducks.
Viking sunstone
The Vikings navigated by the position of the sun. But what did they do when it was cloudy?
The scientists of Mars
When asked why we have no proof of extraterrestrial life, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard joked that Martians were already among us… they just called themselves Hungarians.
The Generalist Academy 